I was early for Celebrate Recovery. I was the only one here until another woman joined me. She was probably in her fifties (I almost never guess ages right, so go figure.) We talked a lot – that intense form of conversation that only takes place before and after recovery meetings. The last question she asked me was this, “What are you here for?”

The week before a addict new to the group, tried to hand her sign off sheet to me. I told her I was an inmate. She didn’t openly scowl at me, but I got that look. I have drank a bottle of whiskey, only to black out and wake up to throw up, I’ve woken up in places I didn’t lay down, and I came to work too drunk to drive. Still, I only look about five years older than my actual age. I lost all that weight and that gave me wrinkles and bags under my eyes. Most of the other women, especially the ones with light skin like mine, all look like their life has been sucked out of them. If I look 5 years older, they look 15 years older than their chronological age.

I passed as staff in the hospital, during both of my stays. One of the women in her fifties had been in and out of the hospital a lot. She and I spent quite a lot of time together when she started giving me quizzical looks. People like you aren’t usually in here.

The almost blind woman I guided from her room to her meal asked how long I had been there. The cab driverl who rescued me from the car that wouldn’t stop, asked me what department I worked in.

I have been so pleased every-time that happened. I am a fresh, freckled face girl who is in her late thirties. I don’t know how long this will go on. If I am misidentified all the way through my life, because I have an invisible disabilities, will I never be who I truly am.

I have heard so many times that your illness, your relationships and your surroundings don’t make you who you are. You are something and someone else more and that is the greatest thing you will ever be and that thing is both a child of God and a member of His family. If this is who I am, all the other illnesses and clothes and debts are window dressing.

And yet they do not leave. If I dropped bipolar from my answering message “Hi, This is Malakoa,” “vs This is the Bipolar Malakoa.” I wouldn’t stop having this illness. My brain will not reshuffle.

It’s one of those seasons where there is so much to do and little to write. My business is going well, so well that my husband had a little chat with me re: the amount of time I am putting in to it. I can understand that, some what, but I don’t feel guilty. If he wants to play with me then he can’t watch Ice Station Zebra and Dangerous Catch all evening long.

I am having trouble with my etsy purchase, mostly because the guy running it takes 3-4 days to return emails, or he doesn’t return them at all. Oh, and when my logo/return address label/web address stamps came (it took a month to get here) one of them was for Karibou Kindness, an etsy store – not the stamp we ordered at all. (As if you didn’t figure that one out yourself). I had to go mail some cards anyway, so I mailed the rubber stamp to the folks in Provo. The vendor had the nerve to send me a letter along with the stamp saying if we had any opinion, different than a five star rating, to be in touch and they will fix it. This is what I want to do:

In addition I want a stamp with my name, Molly Malakoa, and phone number so I can stamp it on cards and give it to people instead of scribbling out my phone number on a small lined piece of paper.

come to think of that, maybe it’s not necessary. I can probably make the business cards with the stamps due me. One with the web address, one with the address and a hand written phone number. I can even wait until we’re about to leave and then write my phone number on the card to make them feel special. I can write the website as well, which I think is a safer way to be in business. I don’t know why I am being so careful about that. I’ve had panic attacks lately – I nip them at the bud with my Ativan, but the fear remains.

I thought I was going to die if I didn’t buy a muti-box of glitter. It was large and beautiful. I left the store but I had to come back. It’s safely in my drawer right now. Don’t try to take it, and you can’t borrow any. Go ahead and try. There will be blood.

I am almost legally a small business owner. I just need to finish up the expensive notices and fees and all sorts of b.s. that I didn’t realize I had to do. I see why people say you should have X amount of money saved before you dive into it. Well, I didn’t. I’m in the middle of this.

Another expense will be clothes. I do have clothes, praise be to the Lord, that because I’ve lost 30+ pounds. I had to wear a dress to drop off cards and am wearing slacks with a chartreuse shirt because I have to deal with some government officials today. I haven’t had to dress up for work since the 20th century. Most of the time I hang in lounge pants, though. Who wants to get glitter on your best rags?

Pay Pal surprised me, too. I have to pay $.30 a transaction plus 3%. It takes four days for money to transfer from that account to my business account. Because of this waiting period, I have to make two trips down-town because I won’t have access to that cash until next week. I’m already eleven days over due when it comes to the fictitious name filing.

I can be a jump in with both feet kind of person. I also can be studious and measured. In this endeavor I am more the first rather than the last.

I went to the grocery store today. I’m usually friendly, let the person with less groceries in his cart go ahead. The grocery store line is not so interesting. I haven’t felt good – my insides are turning themselves inside out and I ate about 1/2 of a bag of Cheetos so that grease was lubricating a pipe where my whole grains, strawberries and freshly pressed pineapple juice could block up and pass through. Disgusting, so what?

Anyway there is a point to this post. Waiting in line I decided to stand behind the groceries. The man behind me, dressed in a burgundy pressed dress shirt and shiny black shoes, was getting off work and getting something for his dinner. I thought to myself, He thinks he’s getting extra points in good citizenship land if he gives the overweight housewife instructions on how to check out in a grocery store she has been in a thousand times.﻿

I felt pretty bad about myself. Then I remembered –

I’m not overweight anymore. So what if I was? I’d still deserve some help – even if I looked Valliumed-out. And what if I was “just” a housewife. It’s something an innumerably number of families work thier bottoms off to have – it’s called a “full-time mom” these days anyway. And I’m not “just” a housewife. I’m an artist who regularly sells her work and I’m a writer.

But if I were just a “full-time mom” that would be okay, too. I respect and love many “full-time moms”. I don’t know why I think it’s beneath me.

I’m in the middle of card making, but need a little break and have been telling myself I would blog every day, so here I am.

I am really hungry. When I get that way, I eat chocolate for lunch. I don’t take the time to really prepare a meal; it never occurs to me. My husband often leaves out leftovers for me, or in today’s version a can of tomatoes and a bag of whole wheat penne pasta. I’m not in that mode right now. Hopefully I will kick my butt enough to throw some tuna together. I may not.

I thought if we moved somewhere, bought a house and stayed there that friendships would be easier. So far, not so. I have many devoted and even some super devoted friends here. Problem is that they don’t stay put the way I assumed everyone but me stayed put. Small had a great friend in pre-school and she moved an hour + away. She had a little crush on a boy that moved away, and her classmate that lives across the street (the smartest girl in the class I’m told) may be moving this summer. My favorite of her friends is moving to Texas. This will not do, but it does. People come and go.

Our next door neighbor has a huge, wonderful family and a son the same age as my daughter. Her high school aged son is lovestruck and is longing to marry his girlfriend, Her husband is big like a panda bear. They are from Central America and can speak English but most often speak Spanglish. (Strangely enough the Spanglish and the Spanish are equally as difficult). I love going over there and we’re welcome anytime. We will also be welcome in Texas six weeks from now, because that is where they are moving.

I will probably cry and give her lots of kisses and hugs when she leaves. She is so smart and so generous and laughs at my stories. (See, her generosity shines when she laughs at my stories). I have decided that I do not want them to forget about us, so we’re going to leave them with birthday cards for a year for all of them. I’m tossing in a wedding card, too, just to twist her tail.

If we had to move it would be to a smaller house and I’m pretty sure it would be somewhere here. I don’t regret our choice. I love the Bay Area and miss it very much sometimes, but I feel like I’m better suited here. My parents live in Fresno and were so disappointed that we didn’t move there, but I just couldn’t do it. I don’t mind the heat – it’s that I can’t relax there. I feel like I’m on edge, waiting for the world to blow up. I fear I’ll run in to an old flame or friend – I’m afraid of my mom’s sister and don’t know quite how to relate to my cousins, who are much younger than me. There are some people I’d love to see again, but there are more that I don’t want to see. When I was fat, I didn’t want people to see me that way. (Ridiculous, but the only place I felt huge and floppy that was in Fresno, or at one of my husband’s workout soirees.) There is too much Malakoa history and I can only take it in small doses. Of course, my daughter will have a ton of history here, but I think she will have to be aware that she needs to care better for people, to set stronger boundaries and I think she is better at living and resting that I was at her age.

It’s April. I started dieting December of 2010. I have lost about 33 pounds. If I lose four more I will qualify for Lifetime Membership, which means I met a goal weight and don’t have to pay $40 a month anymore. I’ve talked about this before, but I have quite a new new readers, so I’ll tell it again.

At 207 pounds I thought I was probably about fifteen/twenty pounds over weight. I took funny pictures of myself looking sad eyed at the camera. I was pretty fat, but not all that fat, I thought.

I lost fifteen pounds and I was excited! That calls for New Pictures! Imagine, to my astonishment, I was not only still fat, I was still very fat. The weight began to creep off and I did (most) everything right. I tracked my meals on eTools program, exercised some, and showed up to meetings. (As of press I have missed two meetings in almost 2 1/2 years.) I got down to 173. And it stayed there. Every week I was either up a pound, stayed the same, or down .2. This has gone on for months now and I’m tired of it. I know how I lose weight: Follow the Weight Watcher’s Program. I will do that, guzzle water, counting points of everything I eat and exercise.

But wait, there is more. It’s warm out and I really wanted a cold drink, like a freddo from Pete’s. I decided to save a dollar and go to McDonalds. Shamrock Shakes are here for just a little while, and I have good memories of a friend who has fallen by the wayside, and Shamrock Shakes. While I was there, I’d get a “Mini Meal” A hamburger, french friends and Diet Coke. (For the record, Diet Coke and mood disorders usually don’t mix. I popped an Ativan just to get through it.) They did not have Shamrock Shakes.

Bait your breath no longer: I managed to find another milk shake. It was good – I sucked it down. It had 2/3 of my Weight Watcher Points Plus for that day and I am pretty sure the hamburger and french fries knocked the rest of them out of the park.

Why would I do such a thing? I am so close to my goal and, when I am asked if I’d like fries with that, my answer is, low and breathy, “yes, oh yes.”

Here some of the reasons I might do such a thing:

I prefer being fat – As T so elegantly put it I want to hide under a huge mound of fat.

I don’t want to reach my goal. I’d rather have the life of gobbling whatever it is that I want, anywhere or time than I want than that of health and wellness.

I hate myself and am going to let my body know it through a steady diet of junk.

I’m afraid of being thin or attractive.

I don’t want to succeed at this or anything else. Keep me plain, chubby, unaccomplished. It’s easier this way. Except for it’s not easier. I could have popped in to Trader Joe’s and got any of their deli lunches. It would have taken about the same time as it did for me to go through two drive-thru menus. Being destructive is a chore with physics on its side. Being constructive needs creativity and planning. I am creative. Sometimes it is difficult to put this creativity in motion. It’s like words that catch my ear and sound beautiful. It’s like a just right jar of red paint – on clearance. Maybe if I saw my body as an act of art I would take better care of it.

I want a tattoo that says, “TOSKA” except for in Cyrillic. I won’t get one. He says they are too expensive and that it would be even more expensive when I decided I didn’t want it anymore. He won’t get one either.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov